The Ontario Liberals have at least one candidate ready to carry their banner in the new riding of Carleton, hoping to capitalize on divided Progressive Conservative support and snatch a rural Ottawa seat.

“I grew up in Ottawa. I feel that representing people is what the Liberal party is all about,” she said Thursday. “I feel that it’s the right time for me and I want to try it.”

Until 2007 Qadri co-owned and ran Showbiz Entertainment And Gifts, the “village store” on Stittsville Main Street.

“I’ve been an entrepreneur,” she says. “I know what it’s like to bring a child to work and put them on a couch while you’re working or baking in the back.”

She chairs the board of the Stittsville food bank and received a national volunteering award for it. She’s helped organize Canada Day events and other community celebrations.

“I’ve dealt with people for years and years and years. I know what it’s like — whether you’re a worker, an entrepreneur, a stay-at-home parent, a farmer,” she says. Over the years multiple people have told her she should give politics a try herself, she said, and she finally took the idea up with a local Liberal organizer.

She’s learned the daily grind of the job through her husband’s work. Shad Qadri has been a city councillor since 2006, winning with sound majorities every time. Theresa Qadri says she’s seen that political success takes hard work and a thick skin.

“You don’t react to the negativity,” she says.

Stittsville Coun. Shad Qadri.Tony Caldwell /
Postmedia

No date for a nomination meeting has been set. The Carleton riding association president for the Liberal party, Patricia Pepper, declined to say whether she knows of other possible candidates yet, but they’ll want to get a move on with the next provincial election due in June.

The Carleton seat will be new then, carved out of the former Nepean-Carleton and Carleton-Mississippi Mills ridings. It encompasses a big crescent of western and southern Ottawa, from Stittsville to Rideau to Manotick to Osgoode to Leitrim.

Historically this has been pretty safe territory for conservative candidates, a riding of farms and rural villages, self-reliance and long local heritage. You have to go back to the 1990s before you find a Liberal who represented any significant part of it provincially, and to the early 2000s to find a Liberal MP, when split federal conservatives helped David Pratt into Parliament.

Qadri says she knows the history perfectly well, thank you.

“Conservatives are not stupid people. People are not uneducated. A farmer, for example, I can relate to. I can relate to the hard work, I can relate to the rural background,” she says.

Carleton’s villages have gradually suburbanized, with more people living in them but working in the city. Stittsville and Kanata have grown together and Manotick is building subdivisions. The political alignments have shifted.

The Progressive Conservative candidate in Carleton is Goldie Ghamari, a youthful trade lawyer who’s also new to elected politics. She’s had a months-long head start. But she doesn’t live in Carleton yet and hers was one of the Tories’ ugly nominations. The actual vote was a breeze for Ghamari, but it followed the aborted candidacy of former Osgoode councillor Doug Thompson (who decided a little late that party politics wasn’t for him) and the ejection from the race of Jay Tysick.

Tysick has helped found the new Ontario Alliance party as a righter-wing alternative to a Tory party that’s shifted too far left for some conservatives’ tastes and says he’ll be running in Carleton since the Tories wouldn’t have him.

Plus for a while the Carleton Progressive Conservative nomination was a proxy fight between MPPs Lisa MacLeod and Jack MacLaren, battling over who was the true Tory potentate in Eastern Ontario. MacLeod won, partly because MacLaren self-immolated. He ended up out of Tories and in the loosely libertarian Trillium party; his personal support in the populist landowners’ movement is meaningful, another claim on formerly reliable Progressive Conservative votes.

Ghamari has drawn active support from plenty of old-stock rural Tories, but there’s a trail of bad blood behind her that hasn’t fully soaked into the ground.

In the last federal election, with the new boundaries, Liberal Chris Rodgers came within a couple of points of unseating veteran Tory Pierre Poilievre. The defending Ontario Liberals of 2018 won’t be the surging federal Liberals of 2015, of course. But if in June the parties are close, the notion of a Liberal winning in Carleton isn’t ludicrous. In the circumstances, a candidate with deep local roots gives them their best chance at it.

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Eleven items were on the agenda when Eugene Melnyk and John Ruddy met with Mayor Jim Watson and senior city staff in the mayor’s boardroom last August, including “evidence of partnership” and “plans for Kanata.